Top 67 David Guterson Quotes
#2. The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.
David Guterson
#3. We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education because the problems are problems of families, of cultural pressures that the schools reflect and thus cannot really remedy.
David Guterson
#4. It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had.
David Guterson
#5. My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.
David Guterson
#6. [H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous.
David Guterson
#7. People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.
David Guterson
#8. I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years.
David Guterson
#9. Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.
David Guterson
#10. The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.
David Guterson
#11. The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded
that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges.
David Guterson
#12. I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael.
David Guterson
#13. The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared.
David Guterson
#14. Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.
David Guterson
#16. There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can ... Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.
David Guterson
#17. There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way.
David Guterson
#19. At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices.
David Guterson
#20. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
David Guterson
#21. The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.
David Guterson
#23. When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.
David Guterson
#24. Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.
David Guterson
#26. I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave.
David Guterson
#27. To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective
David Guterson
#28. I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.
David Guterson
#29. I don't feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me - it's not something I have a choice about. Isn't a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can't make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us - we can't feel Him.
David Guterson
#30. The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest.
David Guterson
#31. One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing.
David Guterson
#32. Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.
David Guterson
#33. I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world ... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
David Guterson
#34. Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.
David Guterson
#35. What sustains me is to be with my family and to write.
David Guterson
#36. Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.
David Guterson
#38. Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.
David Guterson
#39. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.
David Guterson
#40. Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is.
David Guterson
#41. To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion - and a horrifying one.
David Guterson
#42. I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years.
David Guterson
#43. The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself.
David Guterson
#44. Everybody knows what God is,' said his mother. 'You feel what God is, don't you?
David Guterson
#45. I know you'll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you'll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.
David Guterson
#46. I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.
David Guterson
#47. My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area.
David Guterson
#48. How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet
on the other hand
what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt ...
David Guterson
#49. None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we're safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is.
David Guterson
#50. I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.
David Guterson
#51. Today and in a good winter mood, someone not subject to seasonal affective disorder, someone with a generous
David Guterson
#52. The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.
David Guterson
#53. To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
David Guterson
#54. There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.
David Guterson
#55. What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.
David Guterson
#56. I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.
David Guterson
#57. He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbed him all the time.
David Guterson
#58. That the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty
David Guterson
#59. If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest
like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably
was out of their hands, beyond.
David Guterson
#60. To die, he thought, was to escape passion's grasp, but that was the last thing he wanted. Instead he wished to be seized by passion and pinioned, held in its palm forever - he could not imagine any other existence as embracing any real happiness.
David Guterson
#61. Tell the truth,' Nels said. 'Decide to tell the truth before it's too late.
David Guterson
#62. The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that.
David Guterson
#63. I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.
David Guterson
#64. When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.
David Guterson
#65. I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.
David Guterson
#66. I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.
David Guterson
#67. He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth.
David Guterson
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